[kwlug-disc] Notes into "Rust or C" bucket

[William Park]

I just browsed Zig site.  No tutorial!  Geez, they should learn from 
Python.  All you need for Python is their official "tutorial" and 
"reference".  C was like that, just one book.  Maybe it's because the 
author(s) grew up in internet age with blogs, shorts, click baits, etc.  
What happened to classic "textbook" style.

On 2025-10-11 21:35, Doug Moen wrote:
> There's a hobby project I'm thinking of starting, which would require a systems programming language (to implement the virtual machine and runtime for a programming language).
>
> The languages I've considered were C, C++, Rust and Zig. The choice depends on your requirements. For me, the requirements were good support for creating and dynamically loading shared libraries, writing and debugging low-level unsafe code, proper tail calls (which I would use to implement a tail-calling threaded interpreter), a good high level platform independent abstraction for SIMD operations, and a good library ecosystem for the types of services I'm interested, such as GPU and audio.
>
> • Zig is unstable, buggy and pre-1.0, otherwise I would consider it more seriously.
> • Rust doesn’t have proper tail calls. It is reportedly bad for writing for writing unsafe code (the Roc language project switched their runtime from Rust to Zig for this reason). Rust programs are statically linked and Rust has no stable ABI, so I am skeptical that it has the good shared library support I want.
> • C has no portable SIMD API, which I find shocking given its intended goal of being close to the machine and to be a portable assembly language.
>
> So I would chose clang C++, if I ever start the project that is.
>
> Doug.